by Nina Bawden
‘I don’t think he started it.’
‘Maybe not,’ he said quickly. ‘Trouble’s easy to start round here.’
‘I’d like that brandy,’ I said, annoyed by his meaninglessly conciliatory manner.
‘Sorry. I’ll forget my head next.’ He looked at me again.
‘Not ill, are you?’
‘No. Bit of a cold, that’s all.’
A moment ago I had been on the point of vomiting. Now, suddenly, I felt remarkably well, cleansed and purified like a drunk who has doused his head with water. It was as if the little man’s disgusting exhibition had somehow purged me, vanquished the nightmare of hatred and violence by showing me its pointless, stupid face. (This was how I rationalized the feeling, anyway.) I drank the brandy quickly and gave the change to charity, perversely disregarding the blind’s stocking and the spastic’s lighthouse for the simple pleasure of watching the gaily painted dog shoot pennies off its nose into the R. S. P.C.A. kennel.
The landlord said, in a polite undertone, ‘If you don’t mind me mentioning it, I should tell your friend to keep away for a night or two. Nothing personal. As a matter of fact, I don’t mind the nigs. They bring in a bit of life. But we don’t want trouble, do we?’
‘Is there likely to be any?’ I asked, but he had given me his chronically apologetic, crumpled grin and moved away to serve Jones and his chums at the other end of the bar, before I had finished my sentence. Apart from them – and me – the pub was empty and when Jones said in a voice that sounded challengingly loud but wasn’t really, ‘And a whisky for this gentleman here,’ I realized that all the time I had been talking to the landlord their voices had been deliberately subdued. Except when that masochistic little horror had been performing his party piece. Then they had been silent and watching. He was sitting on a stool now, in the middle of the group, and when Jones handed him his whisky – presumably his payment for annoying me – he gave me his cold, lipless grin. ‘Our black brothers,’ he said, raising his glass, ‘and their friends.’
There was a silence. Then Jones laughed, rather uncomfortably I thought, and his eyes sought mine. They had a furtively triumphant look. It surprised me slightly that, with his reputation, he should have been content with such a childish revenge. It would have been more in character, surely, if he had accosted me as soon as he recognized me, which had presumably been as soon as I entered the pub? Perhaps he didn’t really bear me any malice, but I doubted that. Perhaps he simply hadn’t drunk enough to be belligerent yet. It might be as well to get out before he had I thought, and grinned to myself. I called out good night as I left and got silence for answer.
‘I am ashamed,’ Jay said. ‘I should have telephoned you, Tom, but after this morning I was deathly tired. When you had taken me back, I went to my room and slept. I slept all afternoon, until just a little time ago.’
He looked, not well, but rested. His neat suit and clean white shirt apologized for his still hideous eye, as if for some unfortunate, minor mishap.
I felt jealous of his sleep. The brief burst of well-being I had experienced in the pub had not lasted. My legs and arms ached almost unbearably, little sledge-hammers of pain had started up inside my skull and I could feel my eyes beginning to dart involuntarily, in the first stages of drunkenness. I began to tot up how much I had drunk. Not so much, surely? Two brandies in the pub, two with Reggie. A gin before dinner. How many gins? It seemed enormously important to remember.
‘… and Mrs Latour put a piece of beefsteak on my eye,’ Jay was saying. ‘It is a quaint old remedy in England, apparently.’
‘You put it on warts too. Bury it at midnight,’ I muttered, too low for him to hear.
‘What?’ he said, leaning towards me.
‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’ I shook my head impatiently. The movement was sharply agonizing; I felt tears come into my eyes.
He was looking puzzled. Why was he puzzled, I thought? And then it occurred to me that it was because I was behaving so oddly. It wouldn’t occur to him that I might be drunk. He had never seen me drunk. You don’t know anything about me, do you, I thought. I don’t know anything about you. It’s a joke, isn’t it? Here we are, sitting together in this café with the green walls and the plastic-topped tables, pretending we know something about each other when we don’t know the first thing. We open our mouths and talk but it is as if we spoke into a telephone receiver without knowing the lines are down. A warm, slatternly sadness swept over me.
Jay said hesitantly, ‘It was good of you to come, Tom.’
‘Thought I ought to see how you were,’ I said, aware, as of two equally important things, that I was slurring my words and that I had not, in fact, come to see how he was. Suddenly the reason I had come was ludicrous. What had I intended to say? Have you been sleeping with my wife? The thought of myself, walking into this café and saying these words to this – this stranger, stirred up internal, ghostly laughter. Reggie’s red-faced disclosure, my own violent reaction to it, seemed grossly unreal, something that had gone on in another existence and had not even happened to me. Or if it had happened to me, perhaps it was still happening. Perhaps I was still there, locked in that other world. I could not be both there and here and there was no connection, not the thinnest thread, between that Tom Grant and this Tom Grant. But who was Tom Grant? Suddenly I had the feeling that my body was insubstantial and weightless, a thin, transparent shell, revealing the emptiness within. I was an envelope that flapped emptily, to be filled – invaded – by other people’s more robust reality, clamouring, shouting conflicting instructions, giving the envelope a false impression of independent life. Reggie. His hoarse, strident voice bawled loudest. I was inventing these sensations, these sick dreams – I had deliberately chosen to be drunk in order not to face up to the issue. Had I? Should I shout, with Reggie’s importunate voice at this so-called friend of mine, this black man sitting on the opposite side of the table and calmly spooning sugar into his tea?
Jay was talking. Apart from that one look of puzzlement, there was no sign that he had noticed anything odd about me. I could hear his voice, and then, with a great effort of concentration, what he was saying.
‘… so of course it worries me that she should be alone. Women do not like to be alone at these times. Especially when they are ill. Though she has not asked me to come home. She only writes about her hope that she will have a daughter. She has always wanted a daughter.’
The world seemed to be slithering away from me. I gripped the table top and was surprised to hear a voice – my voice – sounding quite normal, though rather far away.
‘Do you mean Agnes is having a baby?’ I said, fatuously congratulating myself on remembering her name. I had so completely forgotten her existence, thinking of Jay only as he touched my own life, that it was a shock to recall that there were other lives touching his, and lives beyond those lives, circle upon circle moving away into distance.…
‘Of course.’ He sounded surprised. ‘I was explaining that I may have to terminate my course. She has really been unwell.… Are you all right, Tom?’
‘Perfectly,’ I said, and, as if in contradiction, the floor began to move gently under me in a kind of slow, surging waltz. Impressions swarmed into my head from far and near, jostling each other like a crowd in the Tube station at rush hour: Jay’s face, bright and small like a miniature colour slide, his closed, bruised eye, the blue and grey of his tie revolving slowly with the dancing floor; a globe turning with myself upon it, blindfold, my hands tied; Miss Florence’s hairy wart and my mother’s hair in earphones and her voice saying, surprisingly, ‘Do-as-you-would-be-done-by’, as she executed a stately dance on the moving floor, swinging round the bilious walls of the café, mad as Bedlam; the smell of the café which managed to be both oily and hygienic at the same time, pervasive and inescapable as fog. I felt I would never smell anything else again but suddenly we were out in the street and I could smell frost and soot and feel the cold air freezing the hair in my nostr
ils and Jay’s arm round my waist, steadying me, and the sharp pain as I knocked my bare knuckles against the door of my car. Jay was leaning me against it. I lurched and he held me up so that we stood close together like a pair of lovers while he fumbled in my jacket pocket. Something jangled, my keys. He opened the car door and helped me in; the steering wheel jabbed maliciously against my chest. ‘Move over,’ he said, bending over me, and then for some reason he was no longer there.
I heard a kind of growl, an animal sound outside the car.
Jay said, ‘Tom, look—’ and then his voice was cut off like a snipped wire; there was a thud and the scuffling sound of feet. Someone laughed.
I felt a dim curiosity, the sort of curiosity you might feel about the thuds and whines coming from someone else’s television screen. I leaned sideways so that I could look out of the car and what I saw moved me faster than I would have thought I was capable of moving just then, even though a small, ironic voice was saying from somewhere inside me: well, what do you think you can do about it?
Jay was on the ground, his head hanging sickeningly over the edge of the kerb and two men appeared to be kneeling over him and punching him in the stomach. Edward Jones, standing on the far side of them, said with relish, ‘We’ll have a word with you in a minute, mate,’ and then I saw that the little man, the comic turn of the pub, was standing with his back half turned to me. I don’t know how I did what I did then – indeed, I didn’t consciously do it; it was as if my body had taken over and was acting quite independently of me. My left arm shot out, twisted the man round to face me and my right fist hit him in the face. I felt, rather than heard, a crunching sound, he went down and lay sprawled and moaning on the pavement. For a second I nursed my burning knuckles, then astonishment at this extraordinary success produced a wild euphoria. It had worked – with the slickness of a fight on the cinema screen. Like some exultant, archetypal hero, I heard myself laughing fit to kill as I hit out at Jones who came for me, head lowered.
Of course I was no match for any one of them singly, let alone altogether. I am tall but far too light; after Jones’s fist had cracked like a hammer on the side of my head, I knew my only hope was to keep them out of reach. And I couldn’t do that for long. It was only a matter of minutes before someone waded in and finished me. Except that I hit one man a glancing blow in the throat – luck, not judgment – and saw him reel away making a gargling, retching sound, I did no other damage that I can remember; my blows were wind-milling, wildly aimed – a dervish dance rather than an honest brawl. I must have looked, and sounded, quite mad. Perhaps it was my stupid laughter that frightened them – madness is always frightening – or perhaps none of them had any real stomach for a fight. Whatever the reason, they had started to run before Jones – I’m sure it was Jones – landed me another one that caught me on the bridge of my nose and sent me skimming along the pavement like a child’s stone along water, until I fetched up against a lamp-post with a crack that exploded the light into pinwheels and golden rain.
I heard Jay’s voice saying, ‘Tom, Tom,’ and then saw, not Jay, but the landlord’s old map of a face bending over me, his mouth pursed and making ‘tch tch’noises, like a nursemaid whose charge has grazed his knee. I could smell his hair oil which had a scent like madonna lilies. It made me feel sick.
I sat up, saw that except for the three of us, the street was empty, and was sick into the gutter.
Jay crouched beside me. His white shirt was splotched with dirt and blood but he looked otherwise undamaged. He gave me his handkerchief; I wiped my face and was sick again.
The landlord said, ‘I rang the police. They’ll be along in a minute.’
Jay said, ‘Oh, God.’
The landlord said, ‘Dirty bastards.’
I looked at Jay. My head was full of a thick, greasy fog but deep inside it was a tiny point of clarity, thin but bright, like the beam of a pencil torch. I said, ‘Could you get me a brandy?’
‘Hang on a minute,’ the landlord said. He shuffled off into his pub.
I said, to Jay, ‘We’d better clear out. Give me a hand.’ He didn’t move, but stayed squatting on his haunches and I said, querulously, ‘You don’t want to get mixed up with the police, do you?’
He shook his head and helped me to my feet. My legs bent under me and I clutched at him.
‘Sure you’re all right?’ he said. He steered me round the car and thrust me into the passenger seat.
‘Fit as a fiddle,’ I said drowsily. Once I was in the car, sitting down, this was almost true. I felt weak and silly but in no pain. All I wanted to do was to sit numbly in the car and go to sleep. Even with Jay driving.
He ground the gear into first and took off for the end of the street like a racing motorist. ‘Wake me up when we get home,’ I said.
‘I am taking you to a hospital.’
I groaned. ‘For God’s sake. All I want is to go to bed and sleep.’
‘That’s why. You have hit your head.’ He muttered to himself as we went through a red traffic-light and then he said something that sounded like, ‘I’m sorry for my fault.’
‘Not your fault. Mine. It was me turning up in the pub that started it. All the same, you’d better keep out of their way.’
This took me a long time to say. My tongue felt furry and swollen in my mouth and the desire to sleep was sliding over me, soft and slippery, as if someone was smothering me with a warm, light eiderdown. I said, ‘They’ll be on the look-out. Not healthy. I shouldn’t go back.’
‘Where can I go?’ His voice sounded strained, on the edge of panic.
I thought. It was an effort to think. He couldn’t go home because Reggie was there. Surely he had other friends, somewhere else he could go? I said, ‘I don’t know. For God’s sake – I’m not your nursemaid. Just clear out for a bit. You can take the car if you like. It’s full of petrol.’
He started to say something but I didn’t – or couldn’t – pay attention. The cushiony softness of the eiderdown was winning now. I had the impression that my mouth was chock full of feathers. I couldn’t speak without spitting them out and I was too tired.
I don’t remember getting out of the car. All I remember is Jay helping me into a place where the lights were so bright that I had to shut my eyes. There were people there, they let me lie down and that was pleasant for a while until I became aware of a strange pain, sharp in the middle and woolly at the edges, that came whenever I breathed. I tried breathing shallowly, in short gasps, and this helped the pain but the light still bothered me, seeping through my closed eyelids and pressing painfully against my eye-balls, flat and bright like a sword. I wanted to ask someone to take the light away, but when I spoke no one answered. I tried opening my eyes – it was a tremendous labour like pushing up the lid of a coffin – and saw I was lying in a sort of cubicle with a green curtain at one end and that terrible light, suspended from the ceiling in a white bowl. I was alone for a while with the brightness and the pain, and then there seemed to be a great many people doing things to me; some of the things they did were painful and some of them were humiliating, but in the end they stopped doing them and went away and let me go to sleep. It was nice going to sleep; there was even a kind of exhilaration about it. The eiderdown had gone from on top of me and was beneath me instead, a deep, dark softness into which I sank with consciously sybaritic pleasure.
Waking was a much more painful process. The light was there again, my face felt swollen and throbbing as if I had thrust it into a wasps’nest and there was a weight on my chest like an elephant. My hand hurt, too; I remembered that I had bruised it on the side of the car. All the same, I couldn’t think why it should hurt quite so much and then I saw Louise was sitting beside me and holding onto it very tightly.
Her face, from below, looked triangular and white. Her nose was a pink blob, set in the middle of the white triangle. She had been crying.
She said, ‘Does it hurt?’
‘Everything hurts.’ I tried to localize
the pain on my face. ‘My nose hurts,’ I said.
‘Poor darling. Oh, poor darling. It’s only bruises, though. You should see yourself. But I didn’t mean that. I meant your poor head.’
‘What’s wrong with my poor head?’
‘You’ve got concussion. And pneumonia. Trust you – not to do things by halves.’
The tender irritation in her voice made me feel curiously warmed, and a trifle smug. Then I remembered. It was like the moment after a party when the gin fumes clear and you remember what a fool you made of yourself. She was only being loving because I was ill.
Hypocritical bitch. I tried, pettishly, to tug my hand away but she hung on to it, squeezing it painfully tighter, for good measure.
Then she frowned at me. ‘Oh – but my God – you really were ridiculous. It makes me hopping mad when I think of it. Such a fool.’ The colour came into her cheeks, her eyes sparked and she looked, suddenly, ominously angry. I felt apprehensive but all she said, in a voice like the crack of doom, was, ‘Going out without your overcoat.’
I wanted to laugh though I thought it would probably hurt. It did. The laugh came out as a hoarse, hooting noise. It was she who was ridiculous, but charmingly ridiculous; deliciously irrelevant, female and enchanting. At that moment I loved, not just Louise, but all women. They defeated life by reducing it to absurdity. I said, ‘I love you.’
I meant it, but it wasn’t enough. I said laboriously, ‘Whatever you’ve done, I love you. Nothing makes any difference, or ever could.’
Once I’d said that, I felt better. Not in a condescendingly virtuous way, but because somehow it made my own feelings clear to myself. I didn’t think I believed what Reggie had told me, I didn’t think I ever had believed it, but even if it were true I knew that it didn’t make a ha’porth of difference, finally. Sexual jealousy apart – and I was in no condition to feel sexual jealousy – I didn’t care. If Reggie’s wife went to bed with another man he could rant and roar, turn her out if he wanted to. I didn’t have to. Reggie might think me spineless and lacking in proper masculine pride. He could think what he damn well liked. I didn’t care. I was myself, filled, not with Reggie’s dimensions, but with my own. Suddenly I felt a marvellously luminous happiness; I wanted to share it with Louise. But all I said, was, ‘I don’t give a fig for Reggie or his swashbuckling ideas.’